Rejection is something we all have to go through and it doesn't ever get any easier. Rejection is not a nice feeling; just picture those X-Factor hopefuls who turn up dressed a bit like a holiday camp magician and sing like an adenoidal cat mewling through an inner tube. Picture their faces when Simon Cowell verbally feeds their innards through the mincer and you'll pretty much get a sense of how I felt when my sitcom script joined the countless others in the cylindrical filing cabinet with the flip top lid.
Normally I take it on the chin and rise to the challenge of rewriting it immediately. Feedback fuels my fire and it works; scripts that aren't read by other people never get any better. But this time it hit me hard, harder than I've been hit before. It was the Rocky 4 of rejections. In fact this is the first new thing I've written since April. I'd like to say I got straight back up, I'd like to say I went to Siberia and did a montage with epic inspirational music, typing furiously at the top of a mountain. But I just put my blackberry down on the kitchen counter top and thought, I can't do this anymore.
People on Twitter told me, 'rejection's good; it's part of growth' and, 'don't give up'. But I was adamant: 'I am no longer a writer,' I tweeted. I went on an odyssey of alternative creativity. I picked up a pencil and started drawing, I bought an old Pentax 35mm camera, stepped out into the big bright world and felt the shackles fall away. What had I been doing? I thought, hunched over my word processor all these years, when I could have been outside, being a photographer or, I don't know, a poacher?
But everywhere I went, I was pestered by words, like wasps around the picnic table. Ideas would impose themselves on me like an overbearing house guest or a seat hogging bus passenger who likes to talk. I swatted them away saying, 'no more!' but like a politician's sex life they kept popping up at inconvenient moments. Like last night, when the opening sentences of this blog popped into my head. I thought, I must write that down. So I am. This is me, writing again for good or bad, smoking out the beehive of creativity to keep the buzzing at bay. I'm ready for the next round, rejection.
Ding! Ding!